These are the eight liveries (paint schemes) I created for the Reno-racing modified P-51 Mustang that shipped in FSX: Acceleration. Miss America, Cloud Dancer, Voodoo, Risky Business, and Ole Yeller are all fully accurate in markings to their real-life counterparts, and up to date; the planes frequently change looks each year. The thing that astounded me - and made these both easier and harder to paint - was how amazingly clean these P-51s are kept. After my work on Pacific Fighters, I was used to seeing Mustangs covered in grime, exhaust stains, fading camouflage, and chipped paint. These are immaculate. There wasn't a single speck of dirt or grease anywhere on these aircraft, and the wax layer on some is a work of art. The teams keep them spotless like this for speed - the tiniest disturbance in the airflow causes drag. Of course, the first comments we got from the beta testers were 'the Mustangs look too clean.'

The external model was contracted out to a group that had previously built 3rd party content for Flightsim. After I stumbled on a small but seriously problematic UVW bug that had to be corrected to properly paint Voodoo, we kept finding more issues 'under the hood'. Eventually, the Aircraft Lead handed responsiblity for the external model to me entirely. In order to bring it up to spec, we had to make some major mapping fixes and some sizable modelling corrections, and most of them ended up having to be done at the 11th hour (and 11:45, and 11:58, and 11:59:37...).

He's not pictured here, but I also completely remodeled, rigged, mapped, painted, and animated the pilot from the neck down (plus his harness) in about 12 hours, after we found out his arms weren't attached to his torso and he didn't have any hips.

Each scheme was split across two 1024p texture plates, each requiring a diffuse, specular power (alpha), specular color, bump (grayscale source), and reflective power (alpha) map. One paint scheme (Ragin' Angel) was cut, and another (Redline) was totally redone twice - it was orange first, then green, before it was red. The entire set worth of the livery .psd files also had to go through a major 'overhaul' process half way through to account for mapping changes, shader changes, and a redo of the underlying ambient occlusion bake that was used as a base for painting.

All told, I painted easily over a hundred 1024 textures in about three weeks.

Never did win a race...

In game result, utilizing DX9c shaders: